Hitman 2: Silent Assassin Review (Silentfog)
This game was my jam back in the day, I played it obsessively, I silent assasined everything.
And it aged like rotten milk.
Look, we are not hurting for quality Hitman content nowadays. If you're new to the series - play Contracts, play Blood Money, play the reboot trilogy. Hеll, you could consider giving Absolution a shot before even thinking of touching the first two games in the series, because they barely function.
The broken AI of this game is the stuff of legends. They open fire if you sprint for five seconds, they open fire if you look at them funny, they open fire just because they feel like it sometimes. And there is no reliable way to knock out someone using anesthetic – only the RNG gods know if the guy in front of you will freak out at the last possible second or not. And they freak out way more often than not. I have a suspicion that this is 60 FPS bug or something, because I don’t remember it being that way, but it is very annoying nonetheless.
And all of that exercise in frustration honestly would be forgivable if level design was good, but it’s really not all that. There are around 6 missions out of 21 of them that are even remotely Hitman quality, and by Hitman quality I mean barely passable, none of them are going to the hall of fame anytime soon. Even Codename 47 kinda wins this round because it at least has Tradition of the Trade level in it. The rest are either comically simple, limited and short, or huge giant empty wastelands devoid of Hitman gameplay entirely. The Hidden Valley retroactively approaches Hunt Down The Freeman level of quality and I’m not joking.
I can recommend this game either to die-hard fans who MUST finish anything Hitman or to those interested in videogame history. And even then – don’t even bother to do Silent Assassin, it’s really not worth it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3427771731